For over a hundred and fifty years, the legacy of the Confederacy has been sold as a noble Lost Cause of states defending their states rights.
The reality is that the Confederacy was an Evil Empire. One of the worst nations in the history of mankind.
The Confederacy was built on ensuring that the institution of slavery would exist forever,
The Confederacy kept 40 percent of its population in bondage.
The economy of the Confederacy was built around enforced free labor. Labor enforced by whip and chain.
The Confederacy used women for breeding and then sold the children.
The Confederacy considered human slaves as no more than livestock
By any valuation, this was pure EVIL and should never be defended or honored in todays society.
This is a mix of fact, exaggeration, distortion, and falsehood, although I agree that the Confederacy never should have been created in the first place and that the Deep South's secession was unjustified. A few facts:
-- By late 1864, the Confederacy began to move toward gradual emancipation. The chief advocate of this move was none other than Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, and it was strongly backed by Robert E. Lee. By early 1865, the Confederacy actually began a program to grant freedom to slaves who would volunteer to serve in the Confederate army.
-- The Confederate constitution allowed for the admission of free states into the Confederacy, and it banned the overseas slave trade.
-- The Confederacy actually allowed more freedom of the press than the Union did during the war. It jailed fewer editors and shut down fewer newspapers than did the Union during the war.
-- The Confederacy did not consider slaves to be no more than livestock, nor did the Confederacy have anything to do with slave breeding.
-- Over 50% of Confederate army officers were not slaveholders, and over 75% of the enlisted soldiers were not slaveholders. Many Confederate generals disliked slavery, including Joseph Johnston, James Longstreet, and Robert E. Lee.
-- Over 5,000 Hispanics served in the Confederate army.
-- About 4,000 blacks served in the Confederate army. Most of them were slaves who were offered freedom by their masters in exchange for military service. These were local, private initiatives. The Confederate government was aware of them and did nothing to stop them.
-- The five tribes of the Indian Territory supported the Confederacy and contributed thousands of troops to the Confederate army. One Confederate general, Stand Watie, was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. In exchange, the Confederacy granted the tribes functional independence and promised that the independence would continue after the war (if the South won, of course).
-- According to the slaves' own accounts, such as the WPA slave narratives, the substantial majority of slaves were not abused, whipped, chained, etc. There were certainly slaves who were mistreated, sometimes terribly so, but their cases were not the norm. Slavery was inherently immoral and corrupting, even if no slaves were mistreated. There is no need to exaggerate the percentage of slaves who were mistreated.
BTW,
there were four Union slave states (DE, KY, MO, and MD) during the war, and the Emancipation Proclamation exempted the slaves in those states from emancipation.
Also, when the federal government decided to send an army into Virginia in response to the firing on Fort Sumter, there were more slaves states in the Union than in the Confederacy. The four Upper South states had rejected secession when it was mainly based on concerns over slavery and decided to remain in the Union--they only seceded later, after the North made it clear that it was going to invade the Confederacy.
